[Rule-list] Red Hat No Longer Supports 486

[Colin Mattoon]

On Mon, 21 Oct 2002 23:05 +0100 (BST)
lproven at cix.co.uk (Liam Proven) wrote:<and I clipped>

 
> I'd propose:
> - XFree86 3
> - a friendly XFree setup utility (SuSE's SAX?)
> - a lightweight window manager (such as FLWM)
> - a lightweight desktop/file manager (such as ROX)
> - a lightweight web browser (Opera?)
> - a lightweight email client (Sylpheed?)
> - a lightweight WP app (WordPerfect 8?)
> - a couple of basic games
> - a DOS or Windows-like text editor (NOT vi and definitely NOT
> emacs)- some kind of PIM (diary/addressbook &c.) would be good
> - a lightweight spreadsheet is also desirable
> - a friendly tool for configuring pppd (I've heard of wvDial but
> never seen it - any good?)
> - some simple hardware setup tools (such as LinuxConf & SndConfig)
> 
> I reckon that's enough. Should fit in a few hundred MB and be enough
> to get online and get useful work out of the PC. No command-line
> apps, no console-mode programs like /links/ and /mutt;/ just a basic
> set of tools to get online and write.

> 
> Thoughts?

I like Slackware...:-)

One reason is I believe Slackware is more viable is that, unlike
Debian, Slackware has no package management system in place that
performs dependancy checking. The administrator is responsible for
ensuring that dependancies are met when using Slackware. I'm not a
developer, just a part-time administrator, and I recognize that I am
not qualified to offer an expert opinion. However, my fear is that if
Debian is selected, APT and RPM will too often compete -- human nature
guarantees that a "Rule-Debian" system will be updated with APT on a
regular basis, and RPM dependancies  will be broken just as
regularly. Debian also doesn't provide much advantage over Slackware
when installing on old hardware: Debian 3.0 needs 80386DX + 12 MB RAM
and Slackware 8.1 calls for 80386DX + 16 MB RAM...and it is probably
true that few will try to use anything less than a 486.

Here's what I tentatively suggest as a beginning:

1. Publish basic written directions to install a minimal Slackware
system consisting of some packages from disksets "A" and "N" only.
This gets a base system with some networking up and running.

2. A custom shell script to be run as root that uses the "installpkg"
command to install a subset of the official Slackware packages to
prepare an RPM oriented Slackware system. The shell script chould
create SYSV style initialization scripts and symlinks as needed, to
mimic a Red Hat system. This script would be run immediately after
rebooting the system following the minimal installation in step 1
above. Easily fit on a floppy.

3. Provide a choice of shell scripts to install X3 OR X4 (It's pretty
easy to substitute X3 on a Slackware 8.1 system when needed -- if you
have it available). Some additional combinations might be shell
scripts that install from a local cdrom, versus NFS...we're talking
about modifications that amount to changing a few lines only in the
basic script.

The remaining problem (not to pretend that this is trivial) is simply
to make sure that RPM can handle all dependancies on this specialized
system.

The only other "thoughts" that come to mind this morning (I need more
coffee), is that AbiWord is smaller than WordPerfect 8.0 and handles
XML (and is included with Slackware) -- "ee" is a great text editor to
use as a substitute for vi -- "xf86config" wnd "SuperProbe" are pretty
reliable for X3 based systems -- "X -configure" can be used as a
"rough and ready" substitute for "SuperProbe" on X4 based systems --
and Slackware already includes an easy to use ncurses based tool to
configure pppd. Pppd can then be configured for demand dialing... 

Later,
Colin Mattoon


_______________________________________________
Rule Project HOME PAGE:  http://www.rule-project.org/rule/
Original Rule Development Site http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/rule/
Original RULE mailing list: Rule-list at nongnu.org, hosted at http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/rule-list